Aurally Audacious Endeavours – Sour

I found out about this band literally today, thanks to procrastinating on CollegeHumour.com, which is an awesome site.

But I was browsing their videos and came upon this one, entitled “Hand Puppets” by the band Sour. I was amazed.

The official title of the song is called “Hangetsu,” but obviously, that’s not the first thing I was noticing when watching this music video.

My title for this post is a bit misleading; a better title of this one would be “Visually and Aurally Audacious Endeavours.” This is an incredible work of art. I don’t know how familiar you are with film or what goes into its production, but this takes endless time and energy to perfect it like they did for this video. And apparently, on a budget of $0 (according to the director).

I am not exaggerating, nor do I mean to sound pretentious. Most people will think this video is amazing, and that is because of two things. One, the creativity demonstrated in even thinking something like this up far surpasses any current or popular music videos out there, and two, it is as hard as it looks to create. I am almost positive of that.

But Sour doesn’t do just that. They also do this:

And this:

Creativity like that can't be reproduced.

Those two factors of awesomeness seem to echo in each of these videos. Plus, they make you smile. For whatever reason that may be, I don’t really care. In terms of style and feel, listening to the mellow, jazz-like composition, combined with the intuitive drumming and impressive guitar and bass, make for a thoroughly enjoying experience.

Speaking of which, it was actually the vocals that most interested me. At first, when watching “Hangetsu,” I thought the singer was speaking Spanish, or some European language. Only until I picked up some words spoken in Japanese did I realize that the singer, whose name I do not even know, was singing in fragmented and slurred Japanese.

Possibly a way to meld lyrical and vocal ambiguity with universal meaning in their videos? No, I’m thinking too much. It’s just a set of really good, really fun, and really awesome music videos.

All three are directed by Masashi Kawamura. You can find him at his website.

Sour, from what I can tell, has some pretty awesome sounds. Check them out at their website too.

Hopefully these will be inspiring, motivating, and moving to you. In a few years this stuff will be internet gold, so be glad I got to you early.

Go and make some art.